When, in early 1943, those two wily MI5 plotters, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley came up with a plan to persuade the Germans that the Allies intended to invade Greece and Sardinia, not Italy, after the North African campaign, they went to considerable lengths to ensure the idea was a success.
Using the body of a Welsh coalminer’s son Glyndwr Michael, they created a entirely fictional Royal Marines officer, Major Bill Martin — “The Man Who Never Was”. But in striving to create a plausible background for their dead protagonist, they encountered one obstacle. Their “Major Martin” had no love life.
The problem did not detain the fertile Montagu for long. “The more attractive girls in our various offices” were approached and asked if they would mind submitting photographs of themselves, preferably of the kind which a red-blooded young Marines officer would be likely to carry about his person, to take out and remind himself of moments of shared passion, in periods of isolation.
Although he had thrown the invitation open to the field, so as not to give rise to jealousies, Montagu in fact already had a strong candidate in mind. She was Jean Leslie — a young, highly attractive and highly intelligent woman working as a secretary for the Security Service, MI5. Montagu indicated to her that she might be a favoured candidate were she to be interested, and Miss Leslie came up with a photograph of herself that exactly fitted specification.
The previous summer she had been swimming in the River Thames near Little Wittenham in Oxfordshire, with a companion, a Grenadier Guardsman called Tony, who was on leave. He had taken a photograph of her just after she emerged from the water, with dishevelled wet hair, which had obviously been pinned up while she bathed, now falling about her face. A towel, held in front of her with becoming modesty, and a cheerful grin, completed an undeniably attractive study. As soon as he saw the snapshot Montagu pounced on it. The Man Who Never Was had now acquired a fiancée, the equally fictitious “Pam”, who would acquire a life of her own as the tragic victim of a typically doomed wartime romance.
A few love letters, also to be found on Martin’s body by the Germans, were all that were needed to breathe more life into the picture of the young girl. These were composed by the head of Leslie’s department in MI5, Hester Leggett, who excelled herself in creating the reactions of a girl hopelessly in love, but not too unconvincingly articulate about her sensations.
One letter expressed her feelings about what was to be the “final parting” with Martin. “That lovely golden day we spent together, oh! I now it has been said before but if only time could stand still for a minute ... but what are these horrible dark hints, you’re throwing out about being sent off somewhere — of course I won’t say a word to anyone but it’s not abroad, is it? Because I won’t have it, I WON’T ... Darling, why did we go and meet in the middle of a war?”
Marrying moderate literacy with Mills & Boon sentiment, Leggett probably hit just the right note. The letters may have been only a small component of the conspiracy, Operation Mincemeat, but they played their part in persuading the German High Command to send three panzer divisions to Greece from France and the Eastern front, instead of to Italy.
The Mincemeat plan of which “Pam” was a part had been hatched in the wake of the “Torch” landings in North Africa in November 1942, when Flight Lieutenant Cholmondeley of Section B1(a) of MI5, suggested dropping a dead man and his deception plans attached to a partially opened parachute over France. This was dismissed on the grounds that the Germans were aware that the Allies would not commit such strategically important documents to a flight that might so obviously fall into the hands of the enemy.
But the idea was subsequently taken up later by the Twenty Committee, a small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents, one of whose members was the ingenious naval intelligence officer Lieutenant-Commander Montagu. The body of the man was now to be released from a submarine, some way off the Atlantic coast of Spain, but where known tidal currents could be guaranteed to carry it to land. In the meantime Montagu and his team had taken advice from the Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, over what kind of death the candidate corpse must have died to make it plausible that he had drowned after an aircraft had ditched in the sea. In the event a vagrant, Glyndwr Michael, who had died of — possibly self-administered — rat poisoning which had caused fluid to build up in his lungs in a manner consistent with the inhalation of seawater, was pronounced by Spilsbury to be an ideal decoy.
Michael’s body was kept in cold storage while Montagu and his team elaborated a new identity for him as Major Martin. He was then, carefully dressed in an appropriate uniform with his false invasion plans in a briefcase, attached to his belt, and put into the sea in the Gulf of Cadiz from the submarine Seraph, while the boat’s CO, Lieutenant Bill Jewell, read the 39th Psalm over him. Half a mile to the south, a rubber dingy was thrown overboard to provide additional “evidence” of a crash.
The body was found by a local fisherman and taken into Huelva where documents and other effects were removed from it by the Spanish military authorities before it was eventually handed back to the British vice-consul for burial with full military honours. After a chapter of accidents the documents, which had been removed by the Spanish, eventually found their way into German hands where they were copied and subjected to close scrutiny. In the meantime a Board of Admiralty announcement in The Times reported the death of a Major Martin in a mundane list of “casualties which have been sustained in meeting the hazards of war”.
Some time later the British authorities received back the documents from the Spanish Navy high command and were able to see that they had clearly been opened and scrutinised. A delighted Churchill received the message “Mincemeat swallowed whole”.
The deception was indeed complete. Hitler became convinced that any attack on Sicily would only be a feint for the main assault in Greece and Sardinia, and for two weeks after the Operation Husky landings on the island on July 9, 1943, no attempt was made to rush reinforcements to meet them. Montagu and Cholmondeley were both decorated for their part in devising this momentous result.
For her part Jean Leslie, who had been born in Andover, Hampshire in 1923, remained quietly amused down the years over her brief wartime incarnation as “Pam”. She always admired the passion with which Montagu had created such a convincing persona for Martin by throwing himself into the role of his creation. “Ewen lived the part,” she recalled. “He was Willie Martin and I was Pam. He had the sort of mind that worked that way.”
After the war Leslie married Colonel William Gerard Leigh, an officer in the Life Guards who became chairman of the Guards Polo Club. With her husband she lived in Palestine and later in Germany. Jean Gerard Leigh worked extensively for charities, including the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in London. She was an enthusiastic and talented gardener who created wonderful gardens at the couple’s homes in Berkshire.
Montagu’s 1953 book about the Mincemeat episode, The Man Who Never Was, became a bestseller and was made into a highly successful film of that title two years later. Operation Mincemeat (2010), by the Times journalist Ben Macintyre, added new details to the story, including notably the name and identity of the “Major Martin”. In his research Macintyre met Leslie, by then in her eighties but cheerful though wheelchair bound. “We were all rather good secret keepers,” she told him, but flatly refused to divulge anything else.
Her husband died in 2008 and she is survived by her two sons and two daughters.
Jean Leslie, wartime MI5 employee was born on November 20, 1923. She died on April 3, 2012, aged 88
